The Ghost Of Phils Society

Yes, it appears there was an issue. It has been dealt with.

Let me see if I have this right. You have purportedly been a member of PN since 2018. You have a total of 3 posts in the intervening time--all of them in this thread. You have never posted an image to PN. I am not going to discuss your previous user name, but I wish to thank you for bringing a security risk to light in terms of disallowed usernames. This has been addressed. Three administrators have now posted to this thread--all of us stating the same thing. PN has not been 'hacked.' The member database has not been sold to devious Indian spam factories. Thanks to those who posted constructive comments. I believe that we have a nice handle on the flow of incoming spam now. Keep a sharp eye, as a random bit might float in now and then. And with that this thread has run its useful course.

Many thanks to @William Michael for bringing clarity to this question. Numerous things have to be done on a regular basis in the background. Refreshing caches, sending bulk groups of emails and notices, so on and so forth. Some work every 5 minutes, some weekly or monthly. These are called 'cron jobs' where a cron rule triggers the platform to act. I believe that the cron for emptying trash is on a 1 hour trigger. So there will be a window from a user's action until the cron action in which trash is permanently deleted.

There is very little in the customs and usage of PN categories that is either interesting or remotely useful to outside observers, or intriguing to potential new members. Our site performance metrics demonstrate all of this per forum board as irrefutable fact. Rather it is obvious that many of our formerly technical boards have evolved into distinct "clubs" and the locus of photo posting threads, such as in this board "Nikon Wednesday." This has been an organic evolution; one compounded by the loss of all the previous photo posting opportunities on PN prior to 2016. And yes, such mass depositing of information has been going on for a very long time. Casual review shows that PG's lackadaisical approach to things 'back in the day' formed the sui generis of what has now become cemented reality. I know this not as a casual observer, or an "outside trendy re-formulator" bereft of experience with PN or any other photographic venue. Rather, I have 20+ years of observation here at PN, and similar experience in forums ranging from L-Serve/UseNet, APUG/Photrio, FredMiranda, Nikonians, DPReview and others. This gives me a pretty solid idea of what is common, what is passing away, and what works and what does not. The similarities in a number of boards at PN--in contrast to the old UseNet/Newsgroup is profound. One basket for everything. Well kids, the 90s are long past, and other boomers are not rushing up to restore our former glory or pay an entry fee. Recently I solicited suggestions from select members who had expressed opinions about the initial changes back in January. I will mention @ilkka_nissila as one of them, solely because he has participated in this thread. Guess how many responded? And yes, admins can tell if a PM has been read or not. All read and no one bothered to respond would be the answer. We acted on @Mary Doo 's request this morning by removing the 'assisted' qualifier. Guess what? An assisted film camera is defined by its ability to translate information delivered by the light metering system to the shutter and lens iris. Let's let it go, as that was part of a early visionary attempt to make PN a bit more granular and relevant. No reason we should want to do that? Now, why would a site want to do that? Let's ignore the fact that PN is exists as a village of about 1K regular participating members. Or that our resources now, however flawed are completely free? Or that sometime in the future this platform will radically be transformed into another format that can be marketable and generate supportive revenue? A potpourri basket is a nice present. It certainly does not make for a viable economic enterprise. So, for even as much fun and humor has been shared here--this thread does nothing to advance the perceptions or attraction of PhotoNet. If members wish to submit constructive comments, please PM either @Sandy Vongries or myself and we will relate it to senior management at Fiverr. Let's be part of the solution!

Are you wanting that just for yourself, or speaking globally across the site? At the request of many members, that feature was turned off back in January. Then at the request of many members, it was turned back on a week later. One can review the discussions on that in other threads. It is easy to disable that feature. It does not however remove the ability of anyone to right-click on an image and do the same thing.

Yes, PN has spent 30 years organically growing a board tree that defies order & categorical hierarchy. Technical boards are a potporri of text posts and image contests--often the latter overwhelming the original, intended purpose of the particular board. Much of this emerged due to previous forum platform migrations which eliminated the feature rich image posting areas of the past. The few attempts to relabel or reclassify a few things to appeal to the expectations of newer and younger members has always been met with angry "Who moved my cheese" threads. However that may be, the 'assisted' does exist! It is the difference between a full manual film camera, and one which uses electronics to control shutter and aperture settings. But given that the earlier reorganization and addition of a few specific boards in an attempt to normalize hierarchies failed at the gate due to member reactions--that effort was brought to an end. The 'Assisted' term has been removed. Everyone can continue "(doing)....whatever...as one pleases. Sometimes everything is lumped into one thread. So there is no need to categorize."

Another wonderful bug feature brought you by Invision! The glitch is that often the 'my images' tabs on a profile initially display blank. A simple right click, as Sandy notes refreshes the empty space and populates it with images. Hardly intuitive, but that's the only workaround we have found. The problem is in what's called "lazy loading", which does not load all the photos at once--but only adds when viewport is scrolled down. The proper idea is to save bandwidth, not baffle users...

There will be no more worms in this thread! Opening it was enough... 🤠 Yes, it would be so convenient if we could block a whole IP scope--such as 103.0.0.0-103.70.0.255 (our India spam block along with 106.x.x.x), or the two IPv6 blocks where most of the airline ads originate from. We simply do not have and are not being given the tools. As Uncle Walter used to say, "And that's the way it is..."

Let's consider this. Take a look at these current PN statistics: https://www.similarweb.com/website/photo.net/competitors/ We are nothing today in terms of internet ranking. What comment does anyone have over being a global rank of 108,122 with total 120 day visits of 686K, with a bounce rate of 75%? Not something with the heritage of PN to boast about. For too many years and too many migrations, the category forums on PN have become buckets of everything. Supposed technical forums have been consumed by daily and weekly photo contests. The recent complaints over the reorganization of "Mirrorless" reflect habit--not proper forum or SEO indexing of our content. Many things are simply a basket that "whatever" has been tossed into over the decades. Administration has held off on further reconciliation. We are now awaiting instruction or changes from Fiverr administration. Stay tuned!

No suggestions have been discarded. Everything is under consideration and is being assessed for inclusion in a new general management plan--and in many instances recently deployed. As has been clearly and definitively stated in another thread, discussion or argument over PhotoNet management or moderation is not allowed in forum threads. Such complaint or inquire should be directed to @TGOPS or @Sandy Vongries. A proviso to that should be clearly understood. We are willing to hear your complaint--but not bound to address it in any way that would lead to misunderstanding or discord to the community. Management is open to suggestions and ideas. This is why threads are created to solicit such response--and staff addresses "fixes" as they are reasonable and possible. We will continue down this road because we are now part of this community also. Because of failures within the Invision (IPS) Community platform, moderators and administrators are unable to delete images that were present before the October migration debacle. For many users we cannot delete images aside from "one at a time" instances. This is not something that we are going to do for hundreds (and in the case of some, thousands of images). What should work as a selectable "bulk" deletion does not work--nor has action on the part of Invision Community administrators to fix it succeeded. Here is what we can do. Your account (or anyone elses) can be completely deleted, ala GDPR style. The choice is whether a member who requests that is to move on, or create a new account on PhotoNet. Please advise at your earliest convenience.

OK, let's get to the meat of the thing. The spam is coming from a 'human' process along with automated tools workers have to expedite the process. When a site is targeted, the software creates a member profile complete with a viable Gmail or other account. If any challenges are presented, the human solves them. Then the system responds to our registration confirmation email. Then they proceed to post rubbish. The new automatic moderation filter will catch those who do it immediately--if members report what they see. WE HAVE NO MECHANISM AVAILABLE TO US that will automatically filter spam. Nor do we have the ability TO ADD A SINGLE PLUGIN to this board. Nor does the corporate ownership have any plans on spending anything to acquire plugins. So we must crowdsource, and make other filters. Some might work, others not so much. Polishing brass on the Titanic is so much fun. Bosun, count the number of lifeboats, please.

Again we say, the thing is a bollix--and not in a way particular to the limitations of the platform we have today. Several other major board platforms don't seem to know any better either. I sometimes wonder what core platform coders think when setting up functions. Things as simple as a real media manager. Or being able to 'granularly' set permissions for certain functions and where they are to appear. Comments/review are one of those. The options are ridiculous. If the review section is enabled (and it should have a comment section of its own), if ALL commenting is turned off all one can leave is a rating. If it is turned off, one can leave a rating comment/review, but the stupidity is that it adds comments not only to the review but also a general "comment" section. Not only confusing, but absolutely redundant for the purpose. And the developers hard baked it into the core code, and no one offers a plugin to remedy the stupidity. Another fun-filled feature here on PhotoNet.

The answer is simple. The software we operate on is 'less than optimal.' Review gives one little yellow stars to play with, comment awards thumbs, trophies, and star icons. You pick, as the intended purpose kind of fails and no replacement exists. Do we get rid of reviews and stick with comments? That is a partial fix and cuts out confusion. The more functional & featured an application is, the more granular the administrative and styling options. Invision gets a bit dense at times and does not know where to put just comments or just reviews. The latter are intended for gallery and album submissions to certain categories of things. Nor does the basic forum communicate well with the gallery application. Turn something off there, and it happens globally. Perhaps in another incarnation...

Members would be surprised at the number of things forum (and other net platform) software does in the background. These are called 'cron jobs' and they are automated routines that do things at different times. Many of them are called "batch" processes, such as sending any email notices, refreshing the system cache, cleaning out temporary files, etcetera. The refresh on the cache is set to a default of every 5 minutes. Depending on how close one is to when that cron job runs will determine how fast the rubbish disappears from the pages. Clearing the browser cache will not hurry the process, but sometimes that can help with other things! The spammy spam is actually hidden immediately. Thank you to any who is participating in this crowdsourced community policing. Nearly 50 were cleared out in a hot minute and sent to the digital dumpster.

Per your request, we have removed that title from your account.